In the Reformed church we are not comfortable with “numbers.” It is not numbers that count but faithfulness…The danger, however, is that we come by this route to develop an “un-expectant mindset.” We see our smallness and assume that “small is beautiful;” the more truly Reformed we are, the smaller we inevitably will be. But... Continue Reading

As Jesus feeds us, we grow past the superficialities that have bound us to find him in creation, in the way he unfolds our lives and particularly in the remarkable good news of his life, death, and resurrection. Day-to-day, Jesus is with us feeding us through the very things we previously took for granted. Jesus,... Continue Reading

Air power is intrinsically awesome, involving—as it does—death from above, out of the blue. Its technological handmaiden flows from humanity’s greatest intellectual accomplishments. When absent God, human advancement—whether ideological, political, philosophical or technological—reflects our intrinsic nature, which is evil. Better we fly with a wing and a prayer. Not long ago, a group of 66... Continue Reading

“Paul, in the Bible, tells my wife to be silent in church. Screw St. Paul, screw him!” shouted a visibly angry Frank Schaeffer during one session of the festival. Schaeffer, son of deceased author and evangelical leader Francis Schaeffer, lamented his family’s role in building the “Religious Right,” and the gathered audience of disaffected former... Continue Reading

But, as J.I. Packer points out…the truth actually lies in the opposite direction. Rather than being a hindrance to evangelism, God’s sovereignty is the grounds for believing that our evangelism has any chance of success at all.

“I must affirm definition of marriage as between one man and one woman,” said Jodi Craiglow, of the Miami Valley Presbytery in Ohio. She directly addressed gay PCUSA members, saying, “As much as my heart breaks for your pain and frustration, I must simply hold to the standard of the God I love.”

General Convention is also notable for its sheer ostentation and carnival atmosphere. For seven straight nights, lavish cocktail parties spilled into pricey steakhouses, where bishops could use their diocesan funds to order bottles of the finest wines.

Evangelicals were entrepreneurial and started new churches, while Mainline Protestantism “doesn’t value entrepreneurship.” The “negative side” is that the evangelical world is “almost all male” dominated with “loud white guys like me,”

The country’s most visible Christian entrepreneur is Stephen Tong, founder of the Indonesian Reformed Evangelical Church, which despite its name has much in common with the Pentecostal worship style. In 2008, the church opened its Messiah Cathedral in Jakarta, a classic megachurch seating 6,000, a grandiose structure that would not look out of place in Seoul or Singapore.

Following Whiteson’s lead, Cham’s comic is replete with oversizd magicians’ hats. Instead of producing bunny rabbits out of thin air though, they emit particles—different particles than those first inserted… And, of course, the most obvious resort to supernatural language is the notorious label with which physicist Leon Lederman baptized the Higgs boson particle: “the God... Continue Reading